Before you sign with a new partner, ship on account or extend payment terms, a quarter of an hour spent on what the public registers say about them is time well spent. In Serbia there is a great deal of it, it is public, and it is free.
1. Find the company in the APR register
Start from the matični broj — the eight-digit number a company receives when it is entered in the register. It is its primary identifier and does not change when the name, the seat or the ownership does. If you only have a name, search on that and make sure you have the right company: similar business names are common, and the register holds some names written in Cyrillic and others in Latin.
Look at three things: the status, the date of registration and the legal form. A company founded yesterday is not a bad sign in itself, but it does mean you have no history to judge it on.
2. Read the status carefully
The register distinguishes four states and the differences matter. Active is the ordinary case. In liquidation means the owners have begun winding the company up — it still trades, but towards closing. In bankruptcy means proceedings were opened over an inability to pay, and your claim joins a queue. In forced liquidation is a particular case: the company is being closed by operation of law, typically after a long account blockade or for having no legal representative.
Of a little over 133,000 companies in the register, about 125,000 are active and the remaining 8,600 or so are in one of the three closing procedures. That is roughly one company in fifteen — often enough to make the check worth doing.
3. Check for an account blockade
This is the fastest and most concrete signal available for free. The National Bank of Serbia publishes a register of debtors in enforced collection: whether a company is currently blocked, the total amount and — most usefully — how many days it spent blocked over the past five years.
One short blockade three years ago is a very different thing from a thousand days that are still running. The NBS states explicitly that the data is official and may be used without requesting a certificate.
4. Read the filed accounts
Financial statements are filed with APR and are public. Look at total revenue, at the net result, and above all at equity: where equity is smaller than the accumulated loss, liabilities exceed assets.
The absence of a filing is itself a signal. About 87% of companies have one — a gap does not automatically mean trouble, but for a company that has traded for years and published nothing it is a question worth asking.
One important note about the figures: APR publishes amounts in thousands of dinars. Revenue of 479,623,523 in the source data means 479.6 billion dinars, not 479 million. The amounts shown here are converted to whole dinars.
5. If the company is in bankruptcy, look at the proceedings too
The Agency for Licensing Bankruptcy Administrators publishes tables of bankruptcy cases: the commercial court, the case number, the opening date and the name of the administrator. It also shows whether a case is in progress, suspended or concluded — which the APR register alone does not say.
What it adds up to
No single one of these is a decision. Together they give a picture clear enough to decide whether to ask for payment up front, shorten the terms, or simply go ahead. And all of them are public — you need nobody's permission to look.